Butene-1 plant planned for Baytown

SBE Chemical Partners has secured the financial, customer, and engineering commitments it says it needed to go ahead with a butene-1 plant in Baytown, Texas. The plant will use Axens’ AlphaButol process to dimerize ethylene into butene-1, used mainly as a polyethylene comonomer. The plant will cost about $200 million and have 100,000 metric tons per year of capacity when it starts up in 2018. SBE is a joint venture between Evonik Industries and Stonebridge Energy Partners. Evonik is a major butene-1 producer in Marl, Germany, and Antwerp, Belgium. The Baytown site is a former Evonik carbon black plant.